Skillific: Headhunting Robot Is After You

The 15 in Arctic15 stands for 15 finalists of the pitching competition. We will introduce them all over coming days in reverse alphabetical order.

Skillific is developing a  headhunting robot to help employers efficiently recruit the best talent – giving them a fully automated recruitment process with multi-source talent discovery and AI-managed pre-selection.

Founders of the firm struggled with hiring and with getting hired for years before they met in late 2014 at a weekend hackathon and they started to work on the startup. In the summer of 2015 Skillific rolled out its first beta version in Estonia, targeting IT and healthcare professionals. Now it lists most top employers in the sector as its clients.

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The team ran one of the most successful Estonian equity crowdfunding projects last winter, raising a total of 88,500 euros. By now the firm has more than 5,700 users and it plans to increase their number of talent profiles to 200,000 in the coming months using their cross-platform crawling algorithm. Skillific aims to build profiles of employees’ skills based on professional, public data available on the web – GitHub, as an example of an open-source data platform for IT professionals.

The competition for advanced hiring platforms is quite limited, with the most obvious comparison to LinkedIn, who bought Skillific’s closest peer Connectifier, also a cross-platform tool, earlier this year. After testing the service in Estonia and validating it – finding the first proof points to show traction for possible investors – the plan is to expand quickly to the UK market.

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